HKA goes to Dubbo

At Healthy Kids Association, we work with health professionals to allow them to better support canteens in their local area. By doing this, it allows us to increase the reach of our message while also creating sustainable initiatives to ensure that canteens are being supported in the long term.

As part of this initiative, we visited Dubbo to meet with some enthusiastic and passionate Health Promotion Officers (HPOs) and dietitians from the Western & Far West NSW Local Health Districts. The HPOs organised a great venue for our workshop, at the University of Sydney, School of Rural Health in Dubbo. This allowed for HPOs, dietitians and oral health nurses from Broken Hill and Bourke to video conference into our workshop.

The topics we spoke about were child nutrition, Fresh Tastes @ School strategy, how to develop a canteen menu, marketing & promoting of GREEN foods and canteen management.

It was a great opportunity to hear the challenges that these HPOs are facing at work and in a rural setting and allowed us to think about how our organisation could better support them. Many HPOs work with small schools where canteens are only open once a week, or they are unable to find distributors of GREEN foods. It gave us a multitude of things to think about as we work to better support rural and regional canteens across NSW.